But while I am Irish, I am also black (certainly I was called “nigger” frequently enough to remain quite convinced that most of the “color blind” crew—when they weren’t feeling charitable—did indeed very much see me as black). So, yes, I am black. I am Yoruba. And that means something. Not least it means a culture, and a history, one that I am nothing less than in awe of, despite ceaseless efforts to make me feel ashamed of it. Don’t tell me you don’t “see race”; my blackness is something I have no desire to erase, regardless of how much lesser, or how inadequate, it has been willfully imagined as.
Growing up, I desperately missed living in a black community. I have close white friends today, but back then I never felt entirely comfortable in those girly friendship groups that characterize teenage life. I did have some nice friends, but there was always a gulf. Sometimes the cause was quite extreme: there were certain friends whose homes I was simply not allowed to visit, and who were strongly discouraged from associating with me. With others it was subtler: a friend’s brother nicknaming me “Brown Sugar,” or another, on a day I remember particularly clearly, shouting, “Look, it’s Emma’s cousin!” of any random black person who happened to pass. Or the memory of another “friend,” the niece of the missionary nun, in fact, admonishing me for making “everybody feel uncomfortable” on an occasion when I related that I had just been called a black bitch (again). And I certainly can’t recall any one of them ever, not once, standing up for or defending me against anything I was experiencing.
The world responded to us differently too. Real talk, I’m quite petite, but I have a full bum and shapely thighs. Clothes fit me in a different way and I hated it. At that time, physically augmented white women were yet to popularize my features, so there were different consequences for me dressing like the others: “Oh my God, Emma, you actually look like a prostitute, it looks much better on Becky.”* Sadly, I’m not quoting “Baby Got Back.” It’s an almost verbatim account from my very own life, although the names have been changed!
In her 2004 essay “Irish and White-ish,” Angeline Morrison discusses the particular tone of Irish racism: “The vast majority of racist insults had some kind of sexual overtones . . . this is a specific character of Irish racism . . .” The sexuality of immigrants, particularly but not exclusively black ones, “has long been represented as exotic, taboo and dangerous.”8
When I hit fourteen or fifteen, I started to get a lot of attention from boys and men. Young girls are conditioned to attach self-worth to these treacherous shifting sands, even when, in my case, it was also accompanied by assumptions about the sexual availability and perceived licentiousness of black girls. Despite the troubling aspects of this attention, it also engendered a lot of jealousy. This might manifest itself in someone saying, “He’s not even into her, he just knows black girls are easy,” something I’d be gleefully informed of by a concerned pal. In short, none of it was really the stuff enduring friendships are made of!
These days, I am lucky enough to have a diverse group of friends, including many wonderful Irishwomen, but among them I’m so grateful for my relationships with other black women, and excited, as the black Irish population grows, about the opportunity for friendship with other women who are both black and Irish, something I never foresaw. Living without black female sorority is like living without oxygen. It is a condition I could never return to.
Before we get too carried away, let’s pause for a reality check. My intention is not to romanticize or attribute superhuman character traits to anyone. Regardless of race, people are people. Some are great, some are not . . . If I’m honest, shout-out to the group of girls I met in my first year of university; they taught me that in every so-called race there are unreconstructed arseholes. With the benefit of hindsight, I can consider it all more critically and think about the ways in which young women are set up against each other, and how, for straight women, competition centered around the attention of men seems to have been such a recurring theme.
Here it was again, although now there was a shift in the narrative. No longer did boys like me because “Black girls are easy.” In fact, having crossed the Irish Sea to the UK, I was no longer straightforwardly even a black girl anymore. In Ireland, people didn’t distinguish between “half black” and black; certainly, I don’t ever remember getting only half the abuse because I was half white. In any case, in that environment, proximity to whiteness did not feel like a meaningful reality—but these things are all contextual, aren’t they? Similarly, in the US, while I was perceived as light-skinned, I was nonetheless a light-skinned black girl.
Now, living in the UK, I became mixed race; and “They only like her because black girls are easy” became “They only like her because she’s mixed race,” or if it was other mixed-race girls, “He only likes you because you’re lighter than me,”* ad infinitum . . .
So I’m under no illusions about any sort of assumed universal black female or indeed female solidarity. The feminist poet Audre Lorde bequeathed us many powerful words, not least among them these: “Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it, rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.”9
But, happily, those relationships of mine were not representative, and soon, with the memories of those rookie experiences behind me, I started to meet all types of black women. A newfound pleasure for me in these friendships was hairstyling. When I left America, I had been removed from a world where I would have had that chorus of cousins and black girlfriends, so this development was something for me to cherish. My new friends hooked me up, showing me how to attach weave (early 2000s, so this was still those black-glue bonded tracks; remember them?) and, more important perhaps, how to remove them.
A seventeenth-birthday present from my mum—a trip to Moss Side in Manchester to get my hair relaxed and extensions added—ended in disaster when it became time to remove the tracks. Entirely clueless about how to get them out, I sought advice in a top Dublin hair salon. As you do. Except you don’t. The stylist suggested acetone. I declined his sage advice but ended up literally ripping them out instead. All these years later, I still have a bald patch. I cringe when I remember this, both for my lack of knowledge and the brutality of my action. After I had moved to London and the dream of black girlfriends became a reality, my homey Alesha showed me how to remove the weave with nothing more corrosive than baby oil. It slid out like a dream.
Over the years, my friendships with black women have only deepened. This is something that seems to be happening generally, too. There is much more care and attention being paid to black women’s identities. We are experiencing a time of profound change, a reconnection with our shared mutuality—a “re-memory,” as Morrison might describe it. In her research with the Mende women, Sylvia Boone explains that offering to plait another woman’s hair is—in today’s parlance—a “squad goal.” It is an invitation to friendship.
A beautiful distinctive style is considered a gift of love . . . It is one woman saying to another, “I like you. I appreciate you. I have thought about you enough to imagine a style that will suit and enhance your features. I am not jealous of you. I want you to look beautiful, so that you will attract love, admiration, and all of the good that these bring. I am willing to stand or bend for several hours working on your hair, expecting no remuneration. My sacrifice proves that I want the best for you.”